My favorite lefty specialist of all time doesn't show up on the list because he spent such a long career as a starter. But from 1991-1997 Rich Honeycutt pitched in 358 games and only pitched 284 innings. He may have had a late start as a reliever, but he was very effective. I always thought that Tony LaRussa's use of him in this way helped usher in the trend.

Choate is also among the first to average fewer than 2 batters faced per game. His ratio of 1.91 BF/G is the all-time lowest, accomplishing this in by far the most games (54). Only once all season did Choate start an inning after getting the last out of the previous one. Here's his batters faced distribution:

1: 312: 93: 74: 55: 16+: 1

After facing 8 batters in his season debut on April 3, it looks like Florida decided put him in this extreme role, facing only 95 batters in his remaining 53 games.

@9, Cory -- FWIW, I think the correct numbers for Honeycutt in 1991-97 are 306 games, 238.1 IP (plus 10 games and 8.2 IP in the postseason).

Did you perchance copy and paste into Excel to do the sums? I just did that and realized that it winds up double-counting his 1995 stats, when he pitched for Oakland and NYY -- because B-R lists the year total as well as the total for each team. (The same thing would happen if you added them manually, unless you made sure to skip over the redundant split.)

BTW, you can get B-R to calculate totals for adjacent years. Click somewhere in the first year you want to tally (but not on a link); the row should become highlighted. Then click in the last row. A totals window should pop up in a moment.

Randy Choate's first name is spelled with an "o" as the last vowel, "Randol." He's the only MLB player ever with that spelling ... but there are currently two in the minors with that same first name, and another with "Randoll."

In 2011, the number of 1-batter appearances reached an all-time high of 41 per team.

Looking at the history of 1-batter appearances (per 162 team games):

-- From the start of the live-ball era through the end of WWII, the average number of 1-BF appearances slowly crept forward from 1 (1919) to 6 (1945).

-- By 1948, the average was up to 10, but it slid back for a few years and didn’t get back to 10 until 1953.

-- From 1953, the average slowly grew to a local peak of 21 in 1970. Then it slid back again, and didn’t get back to 21 until 1987.

-- From 1989-92, it shot from 20 to 30, and by ’94 it reached 35. But it didn’t advance beyond 35 until 2006.

Another development in 1-BF appearances: Into the 1950s, the majority of such appearances came while finishing the game, and as late as 1980, GF accounted for half of all 1-BF appearances. Starting in 1981, that percentage shrank all the way down to a low of 16% in 2007, whence it has crept back up to this year’s 22%.